Tag: CDs. CD-ROM

We’re very happy to announce the republication of Howland’s Directory of Worcester, MA for 1871, this time as a download.

A few years ago we made this rarity available on CD-ROM, but when we discontinued our line of CDs, it became — as far as we know — unavailable except as a rare book. Now we are catching up on making material that was previously on our CDs available as downloads, and today Howland’s Worcester MA Directory for 1871 came up.

We are aware that Ancestry.com does offer lookups in this directory, but we are unaware of any other online sources for this 405 page volume. While lookups are certainly useful, we think that having the “real thing” at hand offers many advantages that you don’t get with a download.

At any rate, you can read more about this volume, and, if you feel inclined, you can buy it via download if you go to our page about the Worcester MA Directory for 1871.

We are very happy to announce that we’ve made two items of Wayne County, NY material again available.

Previously included on our CD-ROM (since discontinued) were Child’s Gazetteer of Wayne County, NY as well as a collection of Wayne County material from the New York State Board of Charities three-volume 1906 annual report. We are delighted that both are now available as downloads, and — even better — at a significant savings to you.

Please CLICK HERE to go to a page all about the Gazetteer (a must for genealogists and local historians).

Please CLICK HERE to go to our main Wayne County, NY page for more about the charities of Wayne County.

We would be remiss, of course, if we also didn’t offer a link to our catalog. Have a look! You never know what you might find!

Just one page from the Gazetteer. Look closely. They offer a course in “Phonography” which is presumably all about how to operate one of those new-fangled things called a “phonograph”.

To tell the truth, it’s not all new. When we discontinued our CD-ROM about the small city of Nevada, Missouri, these three items included on it were no longer available. Now, we’ve taken these items and made them each into an individual download. In the process, we’ve made these available at a considerable savings compared with the cost of the CD-ROM they replaced.

Here’s what’s newly available:

—The Nevada, Missouri City Directory for 1905. (It may surprise you to learn that Nevada was large and important enough to need a city directory. However, at that time it had an Army camp, Cottey College, a state insane asylum, and a fair number of optimistic businesses.

—The Comet yearbook for 1928 from Nevada, MO High School. This is a remarkably modern yearbook for the times, and features higher quality photography than is found in most older yearbooks.

—Some Nevada, Missouri photos. Honestly, they are scans of old postcards from the area, and had that unfortunate stippled finish that used to mean “this is one classy postcard.” Regrettably, they don’t scan well. However, they did appear on the discontinued CD-ROM and we felt we needed to make them available for those who might have a need.

Several years ago, we collected a quantity of Middletown, CT material and published it on a CD-ROM, called, somewhat predictably, the

When we decided that times and technology had provided better alternatives than CDs for distributing our material, we took this one out of the catalog along with the others. Now, The Middletown Collection has made its way to the head of the queue as “Middletown CT Downloads” and we are pleased to bring you four new items.

Here’s what is now available:

–The Middletown Real Property List, tabulated by street, for 1931. Want to see exactly where someone lived in 1931 and what their property was valued at? Want to see who lived in a particular location in that year? You can do it with this download.

–The 1947 Cauldron yearbook from Middletown, CT, High School, including the supplement that filled in the blanks representing the time between when the yearbook was published during the school year and graduation. The supplement, by the way, is very hard to find today — not surprisingly — but it is included in the download.

—The Connecticut Quarterly was an elegant magazine about all kinds of Connecticut topics that began in the closing years of the 19th century. One of the earlier communities that received feature article treatment was Middletown! Lovely photos and quite a bit of history here too.

—Middletown Ephemera. One thing we miss about the CD-ROMs was the ability to include random material that certainly didn’t justify a CD of its own, and was even a little weak to make a separate download. However, when we collected the ephemera from this CD, it represented a nice package, and some may find material in it that is of use to them. One item here is the relevant Middletown listings for one of the annual Connecticut Registers. Another is a collection of postcards of Middletown and particularly of the fraternity houses at Wesleyan. A Chamber of Commerce brochure is here, as is the program for the Middletown tercentenary.

Unlike the old days, when you had to buy a CD-ROM with everything on it even if you just wanted one of these items, now you can pick and choose — and probably save yourself a few dollars in the process.

Why not have a look? Take a look at our overall catalog as well. Who knows what might be there for you?

About CDs…

Back in August we made the momentous “CD closeout” decision — that we would discontinue selling our historical and genealogical CD-ROMs, and gradually migrate the contents of our CDs to downloads.

Well, it’s been happening! We’ve eliminated around a dozen of our CDs as the inventory sold out, and we’re making progress migrating their contents to download format.

There have been three positive results of the CD closeout so far:

–A number of smaller, less significant publications that were once lurking on CDs with little publicity are now available as individual downloads — with their own catalog entries. People can actually find them! Eventually they may even show up on Google!

–We’ve saved time and money. When you deal with physical inventory — creating the CDs, reproducing them, maintaining the inventory, and shipping them — you spend more time, effort, and money than one would think. The net result is that we have more time to spend finding more historical and genealogical material and making it available to you.

–Our customers have saved time, money, and helped avoid clutter. Saved money? Yes! When we discontinued our Canaan, CT CD ($20) we replaced it with three downloads. If you bought all three, you would barely spend half that. And we doubt many people will buy all three. The clutter speaks for itself — we never devised a perfect way for storing CDs of our own so we could find things when we needed them, and it’s easy to store downloads on your hard drive. And time: we figure that it costs us two or three minutes each time we need to put a CD in and wait for it to crank up, and then to go through it to find what we want, and we suspect it was wasting your time too. Furthermore, downloads arrive instantaneously. CDs come by postal mail. Enough said about that!

But still

We do have some CDs left in inventory. We’ll continue to sell them until they’re gone. Here’s what left:

If one of these matches your research interests, we do advise you to act now. Once the CDs are gone, the material on them goes into the queue awaiting republication as downloads. There, they vie for priority with the new material we’re working our way through, so it could be a year or more before material on a discontinued CD is again available. A word to the wise should be sufficient!

As always, thanks to our faithful customers. It’s you whom we do this for, and even as the CD closeout continues, it’s your needs we try to satisfy. We try never to forget that.

Last month we announced that we’re retiring our CD-ROM product line so we can concentrate on downloads. This will likely be your last chance to get the CD-ROMs!

Our first CD-ROM product

Here’s an inventory of our remaining CD-ROMs, and how many copies we still have left:
Child’s Gazetteer of Lewis County, NY — 1 left
Lime Rock: an illustrated walking tour — 2 left
Erie County directory for 1924 — 3 left
Child’s Gazetteer for Wayne County, NY — 4 left
Minisink and Port Jervis — 3 left
New Milford: 230 years — 1 left
Nevada, Missouri Directory – 1 left
History of Garland, Maine — 3 left
Suffield Quarter Millennial Plus — 2 left
New Index of Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County, NY — 1 left
Fountain County’s Activities in the World War — 2 left
Worcester Directory for 1871 — 4 left
Rhode Island volume 1 — 2 left
Genessee County Collection — 2 left
Catholic Families of Kentucky — 3 left
Blue Book of Newton. MA for 1910 — 2 left
History of Litchfield, CT — 3 left
Child’s Gazetteer of Sullivan County, NY — 3 left
Maine State Prison Report for 1907 — 4 left
Emory College Alumni Register for 1910 — 3 left
Landmarks and Memorials of Paxton, MA — 1 left
Memories of Liberty, NY volume 1 — 3 left
Middletown (CT) collection — 1 left
Memories of Liberty, NY volume 2 — 2 left

—When we run out of a particular CD-ROM, we won’t be offering that CD anymore.
—Shortly we will begin to convert the contents of discontinued CDs to our array of downloads. There will be some delay while we do so, but eventually much of the present CD content will be available as downloads.

If you’ve been contemplating buying one of our CD-ROMs, now is the time to act!!Here’s the CATALOG — take a look!

Like this:

CD-ROMs and Between the Lakes Group

Our longer term customers will remember when Between the Lakes Group started selling CD-ROMs full of historical material.

Our first CD-ROM product

The first we offered was one of material from Liberty, NY — still the locality for which we have the most products available. The CD sold well, telling us that people were happy buying historical material on CDs, and encouraging us to continue to build our historical republication business. We followed with more than 30 additional CD-ROMs of historical material.

But that was “then”. Just as, back then, we were witnessing the demise of computer media like 3 1/2 inch “floppy” drives, today we are in the process of another technology sea change — and that is the demise of the CD-ROM as a highly popular vehicle for moving and storing information.

To tell the truth, we’ve seen this day coming for quite a while. We began shifting our new publications to downloads several years ago, and we’ve not produced a new CD-ROM in at least five years. During those years we’ve produced well over 200 downloads, and we intend to continue along that route.

The internet rules today, and the day of the CD-ROM has passed. Every week or so we hear from a customer who bought one of our CDs a few years ago and who now has a computer that doesn’t even have a drive that can read CDs. Beyond directing them to their local public library to find a PC that can read their CDs, or suggesting that they purchase a USB-connected portable CD reader, we have little we can offer these folks.

Except for one thing: we can reissue the material on our CD-ROMs as downloads. In fact, that’s what we’ve already done with some of the less popular CDs, and we’ve not yet heard a single complaint!

Once the material is available as downloads, we’ll keep the CDs available for sale until we run out, and then we’ll discontinue the CD versions. Presto! We will be living in more modern times.

Benefits

Benefits for you, our customers, include:

Instant gratification. You can download the material you want with no waiting for the postman.

Lower prices. It costs us far less to provide material to you via download than it does via CD-ROM, and we pass those savings along to you.

More material available. Producing a new download can happen almost as soon as we have the material — no waiting until we have a CD-ROM full of stuff.

No deteriorating CDs. We’ve not seen this problem yet, but we’ve been advised to expect CDs that we shipped a decade ago will begin to fail.

Easier to store your information. You can put the PDF file of our download right in the same folder on your computer where you store your own notes on that subject, not in a paper folder or a CD box somewhere to misplace or discard in error.

At any rate, you will see this process — the process of converting from CD-ROM to downloads — speeding up going forward. We think you’ll be very happy with the result!

To see what we have for a particular locality or interest of yours, why not visit our catalog today!